Introducing the Humanities for All Blog
In building and promoting Humanities for All, we've had a unique opportunity to reflect on public engagement. We have learned from all who are involved in publicly engaged humanities work, and shared their voices in profiles of their work and in essays that consider trends in the field. Expanding upon this work, we are delighted to announce the launch of the Humanities for All blog, which invites others to reflect in their own words on their work and promising models and trends in the field.
This new space on the Humanities for All website will feature original contributions from outside writers exploring publicly engaged humanities initiatives that address the challenges of the current moment and that explore practices and trends in U.S. higher education.
We are excited to share our first three posts.
The first contribution, by Jennifer Ho of the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Humanities & the Arts, explores how the Center she directs is responding to the challenges of the current moment.
“I’m not sure what the next academic year will bring,” Ho writes. “But I do know that we want to continue to support our community at CU Boulder through community, through collaborations, and most of all through sharing the necessity of arts and humanities.”
The second contribution, by Matthew Pavesich of Georgetown University, discusses an innovative way of integrating Humanities for All into classroom learning in order to explore the power and range of the publicly engaged humanities.
“It’s the rare student who already has a good sense of the ‘public humanities,’ let alone a sense of the range of work or the possibilities therein. We can read all the articles we want, but that’s not enough for students to get a sense of the work,” Pavesich notes. “We need to see examples—lots of them—for students to see what exactly the public humanities can be. The NHA’s Humanities for All project offers a perfect opportunity to begin to familiarize students with this kind of work.”
The third contribution, by Sarah Willen of the University of Connecticut, introduces the Pandemic Journal Project and its effort to capture the full range of experiences of the current moment.
“Although the Project initially was developed to capture experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Willen writes, “its scope has expanded, by necessity, to include participants’ reactions to the death of George Floyd and the widespread social and political unrest his murder has ignited across the United States and around the world.”
Looking forward, we would like to hear from you about your work.
While the Humanities for All blog publishes on all aspects of the publicly engaged humanities in U.S. higher education, we are particularly interested in the following:
- Discussions of ways that humanities scholars and students can engage wide-ranging communities during times of crisis;
- Case studies featuring publicly engaged initiatives and projects involving faculty and students of U.S. universities and colleges;
- Considerations of publicly engaged practices in undergraduate and graduate instruction;
- Analysis of trends in publicly engaged work at U.S. higher education;
- Discussions of how the Humanities for All database and essays have been used in publicly engaged research, teaching, preservation, programming, and infrastructure;
- How the Humanities for All database and essays have been used in the classroom; and
- Posts that foreground the voices of community partners.
To learn more about how to contribute to the Humanities for All blog, click here.